14. Sexual Tension Is a Myth (Here’s What’s Really Happening)

Welcome to the Breaking Free from Porn podcast. My name is Samir Gardner Gardner, and today we're going to talk about how to remove sexual tension. Now, this topic, sexual tension, is something which a lot of people struggle with. So let me explain what actually happens, like what is the process or what is the problem that people go through. So they feel the desire to do something. So when we feel the desire, it's if it's prolonged, meaning if it is something that you continually do, it means that you are fantasizing about something. Okay? So for example, if I fantasize constantly over 5 minutes and then I continue on fantasizing for 30 minutes and then 1 hour, I'm essentially creating that sexual tension. Now there's a few misconceptions that we need to be aware of, which essentially creates this notion or this belief that this sexual tension is going to be there until you release. And then that, in of itself, that belief, not the act itself, not just the tension itself, or not even the desire, but just that belief that you will have it until you release, makes the person, I mean, the person becomes motivated to actually release because he doesn't see any other options. So I want to show you like alternatives, okay? So understand that you don't need to release. Not alternatives like, oh yeah, just go get real intimacy, or just do this specific exercise, or just do this breathing technique. Even though these exist, I'm gonna talk about it. I mean, I'm gonna talk about options slash alternatives that are gonna be a bit easier for you to apply, that are gonna be more reliant on your mind rather than something external to you, okay? So let's understand something first and foremost. We oftentimes, like, with sexual tension, we almost see it as something that's different from any other type of tension. When we really think about it. So if you feel fear, for example, your body gets tense. So if you feel fear because you're walking alone at night, your body literally gets tense. That physical tension, do we interpret that as something that we need to get— I don't know, we need to release the fear in a certain way where we're going to be able to then release that physical tension? Not necessarily. We don't even think about that. We just, we just think about the fear and we just like, for example, okay, the reason why we feel fear. So if I'm walking alone at night, the reason why I would feel fear is because, well, I think that if I feel fear, then I'll be able to maybe survive or to be more alert or, and so on. Like my heart is racing, so I'll be, I'll have like, let's say, let's simplify it. Like I'll be able to react properly if whatever threat I imagine could could occur, like if any problems could occur in front of me, then I'll be able to deal with it. That's the reason why we feel fear, okay? Let's just simplify it like this. Now, that fear and then your heart is racing, okay? We could say that this is the equivalent of your genitals being aroused and when you fantasize, when you have what we call sexual tension, or your body getting tense when you feel fear. Now, the moment, okay, let's say you feel that fear because you're walking alone at night, and then suddenly, you get a call from, let's say, your family, a family member, and he says, where are you? I'm going to pick you up. I'm pretty close to where you were. And you know, he's like a minute or two away from you. Suddenly that fear completely disappears. Or maybe it will, let's say, it will go down a little bit. But as time goes on, it will just like disappear. And when that fear disappears, what happens is the physical tension also disappears. Yeah, of course you might still feel a bit tense, but then it just disappears. Your heart stops racing so fast. Is it because physically there is someone in front of you that's getting rid of that fear? Meaning like, did the guy, how did he pick you up in his car? Now you don't feel fear because you know, okay, I have someone I can trust. Or is it that you think, and this is crucial that you understand this, you think, okay, I'm going to be picked up soon. And this is just your thoughts. It's not maybe, not even reality maybe, but just because you think, you believe that someone is going to pick you up, that you tell yourself, okay, I don't need to feel fear anymore. Do you see my point? So when it comes to intimacy, PMO, and so on, we need to first understand why is it that we want to fantasize about this? Now, of course, we don't wanna spend so much time like just trying to figure that out and overthink it and then try to fight it. Of course not. But we have specific reasons as to why we decide to just constantly fantasize. We don't fantasize just because it's our nature, just because it's our biology. We have complete control over that. Of course, the desire to be with women, the desire to do certain things are innate to us. Okay, I have the desire to, let's say for example, um, have friendships. Okay, to have friends, to have a tribe. Let's, uh, take These words from evolutionary psychology. So yeah, I have the desire to be around other people, okay? But do I need to constantly fantasize about that? I might fantasize about that for sure. From time to time, I might be like, I don't have any friends around me. I'm alone, I'm isolated. I might fantasize about how good it would feel to have friends. I might do it from time to time, but do I overly do it? No, that is the thing. Why do we overly do it with PMO? It's because we think that we get things out of that that we don't think that we can get anywhere else. Examples: pleasure. Most commonly emotional feelings, like feeling, for example, accomplished. Big one, big one within the people I've talked to. Feeling accomplished, what do I mean by that? People are not aware of that, but they really, really learned as they were growing up that the man that can sleep with women, whether that be through marriage or whether that be just through casual sex or just a woman lusting, let's not use that word, woman being attracted to them as a form of accomplishment. Because yeah, it's like this red pill thing of like the man that has the most women then is like the most attractive, therefore it's like logical that he's the, let's say, the most valuable. Okay? So we see it as a form of accomplishment, just like some people will overly fantasize. And I used to be like that a bit more where it's like about success, like, okay, man, I'm gonna achieve this and I'm gonna prove people wrong. And you constantly fantasize about that. You constantly visualize those scenes in the back of your mind and you feel as if like you already achieved those things. And this is the thing, okay? This is what we need to be aware of. The reason why we fantasize so much is because to fantasize gives us a light substitute. It gives us like a false substitute. It's not like you could argue it's not a real substitute. We'll just use the word substitute to make it very, um, I mean, easier to understand. But it gives us like a temporary, like, uh, it's, it doesn't match the real experience whatsoever. Like not even a 1%, I would argue, but it gives us only the feeling that we're after. Because we could argue that as human beings, we don't want the Lamborghini just to get like a physical, like a physical, like material. No, we want how we're going to feel if we get that, like the meaning that we attach to that. Okay, so when we fantasize so much to the point where we have sexual tension, then that— and, and then with that physical tension, sexual tension, we want to release it. Well, the reason why we fantasize so much to begin with, which starts all of this, is that we want to feel a certain way. We want to feel accomplished, we want to feel worthy, we want to feel masculine. We want to feel valuable. Big ones, we want to feel love. And when you think about the intimacy, what is going on? You're imagining a scenario where first of all, you're not rejected, you are in full control of that, you're only winning, you cannot lose, there's no downsides because you're in full control of that. So you imagine the best case scenario and therefore you can choose how you're going to feel, okay? If I think, and I don't wanna get graphic or explicit here, But if I think, okay, this woman is showing me, is giving me intimacy, she's showing me love in ways that I know, like, pretty much no woman would ever do this except if they're really attracted to the man that they're with. But if I think about these things and I feel like I'm experiencing those things because I'm really visualizing them with focus, then guess what? I'm going to feel as if I am actually experiencing this. I am not experiencing this, but I feel like I am. You can do this with anything, by the way. Like, you can think about, I'm driving a Lamborghini, and let's say a Lamborghini means that you feel accomplished, and you're going to feel this sense of accomplishment. And then you get back to real life and you realize that, you know, this is not reality, and that you're going to feel normal again. Okay, but the point I'm trying to make is you gotta first and foremost ask, why is it like that? Why is it that I want to think about Fantasy, why do I want to fantasize so much? Why do I want to think about sex and intimacy so much? Talking a bit fast right now, so I'll just slow down. So yeah, this is what you want to ask yourself, okay? Because think about it like this, the moment, okay, like we gave the example with fear, the moment you get distracted or you tell yourself you don't need to think about it anymore, Okay? Let's say you think, well, the equivalent of, oh yeah, a family member is going to pick you up, therefore you don't feel fear anymore, would be in the case of intimacy, it could be like, okay, you will get— this is hypothetically because I don't think that's gonna be the case for a lot of people, that it's really realistic. But let's say that you know that, okay, in one week you're gonna be married and you're gonna have as much intimacy as you want. You can probably think, okay, well, you know what? Let me not think about that because I'm gonna get the real thing soon. So there's no point in me thinking about that. Okay? And that's what's going to happen hypothetically. Okay? Now, of course, someone can decide to do the opposite of that. They have free will, they can do whatever they want, but we can really think about it like this also. Okay? You know, you can tell maybe from personal experience, if you're like, you know, when you're constantly fantasizing, you're thinking about intimacy and then you feel so aroused to the point where it's like you don't even know if you're going to accidentally release. Okay? To that point, I've been there before, but when you get to that point, when you get to that point, it almost feels like, okay, there's— you can't go back. Okay, I'm gonna explain like why you can go back and that there's no like problem when it comes to that. But I want you to be aware of one thing. If in that situation you get, for example, hypothetically, or maybe you experienced this before, getting, for example, invited somewhere by your friends, let's say, or you get a call from someone, or you physically change, like you go out and you need to go to work, or you need to go do the groceries, or you do anything that really takes your mind off for a few minutes, for a few hours, from obviously the fantasizing, you will see the same thing with fear. That tension, that physical tension, like that arousal and that desire to just release and feeling like you cannot go back, will just completely disappear. It's almost as if nothing happened. Or sometimes you go to sleep, you wake up in the morning, you kind of like forget about that. Yeah, you fantasize so much the day before, like you don't have that sexual tension anymore. And the beauty about the human body, and I've talked about this many videos, if you watch just my few courses on YouTube, you've probably seen this before, you have a self-cleansing, a natural self-cleansing mechanism. Your body recycles itself. I've talked about this many times, so I don't need to really go too much in depth into it, but you first and foremost have wet dreams, natural emissions. So it is something that you probably experienced before, but if you fantasize so much throughout the day, the likelihood that you're going to have like a wet dream at night is going to be a bit higher, okay, a bit higher. And that shows that your body anyways will have the release. So when people have the release, and this is like, I don't want to confuse you guys, but some people they have a wet dream, and this is me when I first started NoFap, I had a wet dream and then I was like, that means that I failed, okay? Or that means that I can do it again, okay? Very dumb. I don't even know why I talk like that, but a lot of people actually think like that. They think, okay, I had a wet dream, that means that, oh, maybe I need to reset my counter. I had like an actual release or whatever. And then they go and binge because they feel like, oh no, started back from zero. And then there's people that are like, oh, I got a wedgie, therefore I don't need to release because it took care. I mean, my body did it for me, let's say. The point I'm trying to make is your body, when you have that sexual tension that is created by your mind, by the way, not by your body, the body will take care of itself anyways. Not only is it a matter of the mind, meaning that the moment you don't think about it, the moment you don't think about it, it won't be there anymore. But even if you were to worry about like the physical aspect because you just aroused yourself and you could feel like the— like you were close to releasing, your body will take care of that anyways and you'll just be living normally. Sometimes the real issue is, and the real question you got to ask yourself, okay, because I've been there before, is first and foremost obviously like why do you want to fantasize so much? Like what is it that you get out of it? Like, what do you think that you get out of it? But sometimes it's like, why do you decide to spend so much time maybe indoor? And why do you decide to spend so much time just, I mean, doing nothing like outside of your routine? Why are you not like, for example, okay, there's maybe an opportunity to start a martial art, maybe there's an opportunity. I'm not saying that these are solutions, by the way, to quitting porn and masturbation. I'm just saying that sometimes these are things that will improve your life. And as a byproduct of improving your life, obviously you're going to see porn and masturbation differently, probably. Okay. Like, think about it. Like, like, I'm not saying these are solutions. Again, I'm not saying it's like cause and effect. Like, okay, you start a sport and then you will have a 25% decrease in your porn consumption. It's not like that. Sure, there's a strong correlation, but there's no causation here. But it's really like, okay, like, Why not? Why spend all day at home? For example, outside of work, outside of business, why not do something new? Why not try to meet new people? Sometimes I'm saying sometimes these are what people need to work on. These are things that people need to work on, but we think, no, I need to really master my mind. Mastering your mind is going to be amazing. And you're probably doing this just by listening to these podcast episodes, but sometimes you want to go back to the basics. So I hope this was helpful and I'll see you guys in the next episode.